A sports shooter turned landscape photographer, Don Smith’s switch to Sony mirrorless cameras was, like his entire career, all about the light.

Don Smith has always been an early adopter of the best new technologies. In 2002, as a working sports photographer, he invested in the first widely available, reasonably affordable DSLR—the Canon EOS D30. In recent years, having traded sports for landscapes, Smith made another big switch—from a bulky DSLR to the next big thing: the Sony A7 line of mirrorless compact cameras.

“A lot of my colleagues said you’re crazy,” he says. “‘This digital thing is never going to catch on.’ I’m starting to see the same thing happen with mirrorless. I believe you have to keep your eye on the future if you want to survive in this business. And digital was going to be the future and I didn’t want to try to play catch up. I wanted to get out head of it and be on the front end.”

Smith has stayed on the cutting edge, albeit not before investing some time in testing mirrorless cameras. His first was a Fuji; he enjoyed the small size but found the camera itself lacking. It wasn’t until the Sony A7R that he felt he really had the right tool in his hands.
What I absolutely fell in love with first about mirrorless,” he says, “was that I was looking at what the sensor was going to capture. That was really the hook for me. I started hearing some really good things from my colleagues about the Sony A7R. I had been all Canon, and as a pro I never thought there would be any way that I would be thinking seriously about mirrorless. All I wanted was more dynamic range, and Sony was the first company in my opinion that started paying attention to what pros really wanted in cameras. They were building these phenomenal sensors and I was getting two-and-a-half to three stops more dynamic range than my Canon 5D Mark III. That’s not a knock on Canon; that’s just saying that somebody was being a little more progressive in these sensors. Canon just released this 50-megapixel camera. Even as a full-time landscape photographer that’s not really what I need. I have more than enough megapixels. What I want is more dynamic range.”
Smith loved the dynamic range of the first generation Sony A7 cameras, and he’s blown away by the new Sony A7r II. After one shoot, he was so impressed with the detail and dynamic range that he penned a blog post: Have We Achieved Human Vision?
I was shooting right back into the setting sun,” he says of his first test of the A7r II, “with fog and clouds. I chose a frame, took it into Lightroom and made a few adjustments and there it was. I just said ‘oh my gosh.’ I recovered all the highlights, even in the sun. If you put up a histogram there is no fully blown highlight there. The color, it was so vibrant. I was up with another photographer and we couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It was incredible. I can’t tell you unequivocally it’s replicating human vision, but it’s so close! This was an extreme lighting situation, so to be able to dive in and pull one frame and tweak it a little bit in Lightroom and go there it is, it was just incredible to me.”

Running workshops,” Smith says, “I get to see files that come off of all different cameras, and every time one would come off the Nikon D800 or D810—which use the same sensor as the Sony A7r—I would go, ‘Is this a blend of images?’ Oh no, that’s one image. I told my wife I have to catch up. At one point I really thought about selling off all my Canon gear and making a full switch over to Nikon. I went through this for about a month and I thought, no, the smarter way to do this is to get that Sony sensor in an A7R and get the camera and a Metabones adaptor so I can adapt to all my Canon glass and see how I like the camera. And that was it. I got that camera in my hands and I did not want to give it back. I told a workshop group at the time, ‘This is the most incredible camera I have ever had in my hands, the most incredible sensor I have ever worked with.’”
Smith has subsequently switched to all Sony glass to fully reap the benefit of the smaller system, and he’s pleased to have maintained the high standards for image quality he’s established throughout his nearly-40-year career.
“Sony is really ramping up the lenses,” he says. “The Batis and Loxia lenses, they teamed with Zeiss to build this glass. It’s incredible. I’ve been running tests against all the Canon Series II glass. I’ve read online reviews that are up and down, but every one of these lenses either meets or exceeds the sharpness of what I’m seeing in my Canon Series II glass. Really every lens is exceeding it. The 24-70 is easily as good. I’ve been shooting 40-plus years, so I’m doing from real life experience and just going out and shooting. I go out and I want to see how these cameras perform and these lenses perform under real situations that I am shooting in and the type of light I am shooting in. That’s going to be what I hold as the true benchmark for me.”
Smith is especially concerned with sharpness and dynamic range largely because he shoots in the type of challenging lighting situations that will accentuate any shortcoming. Most landscape photographers are lovers of light, but for Smith it’s the end-all, be-all. It’s a lesson he learned from one of his idols, pioneering mountain photographer Galen Rowell—who, coincidentally, used a “small” camera too.
“I absolutely loved Galen’s work,” Smith says, “and it inspired me. At the time Galen was shooting there was sort of this dichotomy; as a serious landscape photographer you used a 4x5 or even an 8x10. And here’s this guy with a 35mm camera because he wanted it to be light because he is hiking and in the mountains. One of his famous quotes is, ‘My first thought is always of light.’ That has just stuck with me and has been my main thought process every time I go out to shoot. It sounds funny, but I am not really looking for a specific in the landscape to shoot, I first look for the light. Once I find the light, it can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. And I really learned that through the writing and the images of Galen Rowell.”
“When I was younger I was a ski racer,” he continues, “so I would see this incredible light, this glow, early in the morning—first light when it is hitting a distant peak—and late in the evening. That really resonated with me. Transfer it to anywhere I go now, I’m looking for the light! I just got back from a three-week trip through Europe. Whatever is there I will put with it at the time, but the light has to be number one, the very first thing I look at. I am not really what you would term a ‘middle of the day’ landscape shooter. Wherever I am, I’m on location 45 minutes prior to sunrise, and honestly if it’s a clear sky day, as soon as that sun crests and skims the horizon 50 minutes later, I may be done.”
At sunset, when the last light is fading, Smith says his Sony cameras really shine. At times like these the cameras in fact exceed human vision, producing low-light colors the naked eye just can’t see. “A sunset can be a dime a dozen,” he says. “The light, for me, begins on a clear sky day after that sun has set and I’ve got maybe a half-hour to 45-minute window that I can really work the light. These digital cameras just opened up a whole new world to me, because even when our eyes can’t see the color anymore, when our cones start shutting down and it’s just the rods transmitting these black and white tones to our brain, these digital cameras obviously can still see that color. I just find it fascinating that I’m looking at a scene that is almost void of color, and I’ll do a long exposure and this gorgeous color is just popping up on the back on my LCD. It still fascinates me to this day.”